«Perhaps the most iconic panorama in western movies is the cattle drive, with vast numbers of bawling Texas longhorns fanning out to cross the wide Red River, herded by a small fraternity of loose-limbed, laconic cowboys on horseback. Read this scene through the lens of Tim Lehman's Up the Trail, and it looks quite different.
—Christine Bold, Times Literary Supplement»

«This concise synthesis of life on the nineteenth-century trail drives north from Texas is ideal for the general reader as well as students in Texas or western American history classes. Tim Lehman deftly brings the long drives to life, thanks to copious primary source quotations from nineteenth-century reminiscences, diaries, publications, and newspaper accounts . . . Up the Trail does an admirable job of taking readers behind the tall tales to see the real lives of real cowboys on the great cattle drives as well as showing their transition from history to mythology.
—Richard W. Slatta, North Carolina State University, Southwestern Historical Quarterly»

«In Up the Trail Tim Lehman provides an astute and . . . thorough history of the Texas cattle industry from its inception to the mid-1880s. Lehman ably traces the beginnings of the cattle trade, moving quickly and logically from Christopher Columbus's importation of cows in the late fifteenth century to the massing of large herds in the early nineteenth century. Lehman does a good job of showing us how this U.S.–defined and defining activity owed much to the those who were among the first cowboys.
—Stanley Corkin, University of Cincinnati, Journal of American History»

«From the dust and ashes of the trails rose an American icon, the cowboy. Lehman traces this transformation in cogent fashion, from the night-herd songs and poems, to the "dime novels," to the Hollywood "horse operas" of the early 1900s. Gone from this legend were the hardship, the cruelty, and the extreme toll exacted from the land, the stock, and the men of the trail drives that we are given glimpses of in this appealing book.
—Tim Keane, Kansas State University, Great Plains Quarterly»